h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I was given "the talk" about not following strangers who promised you something nice shortly before we went on vacation to bavaria to my mother's uncle's quite rural place. When the neighbour, who mowed the grass for him, came over when he saw me and my sister playing he asked would we like to come over and see his baby rabbits we both ran inside screaming... Boy was he confused, he really just wanted to show us the bunnies!

Potholer, have you heard the song "cheesecake" by king missle? It ties in nicely with your cake analogy. Anyway. I for one am curious about statistics on paedophile attacks per year. That would put us on some kind of footing about whether its worse or better now. My bet is that it isn't worse, its possibly better, but probably the same.

I don't know about all of you, but given where I live, the idea of my daughter being outside by herself scares me to death. We live less than 2 miles from a freeway onramp, and in southern California, once someone's on the freeway, they're gone.

Not to mention that I don't live very far from where Samantha Runnion was taken out of her yard, raped, and murdered. At the age of 5. The idea of that happening to my daughter makes me overprotective, sure, but I've also told her what to do...run screaming the other way, hit, don't get in cars...geez, it's a never ending litany of things NOT to do.

Around here, all the mothers tell our kids one rule...if one goes, you all go. As a result, we have roving packs of kids, which actually works out quite well for all of us.

As for miniskirts, my daughter's skirts all tend to be shorter, but once they hit a certain length (largely because she grew), they're out. But without any pushing from me (in fact, I was pushing the other way) she likes lowslung jeans/shorts/skirts. I think it's because she has a funky belly button, and fabric rubbing on it annoys her. I just make sure she wears longer shirts is all.

On my campus, sometimes I can't tell if the students are on their way to class or to work the pole. Heels and microminis, tube tops and cropped tanks with bra straps hanging out...geez.

Or, of course, the fear of child pornography can be used to make *any* kind of pornography easier to control (or too bureacratic or maybe even too risky for people to be involved with):

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/06/24/us_law_2257/
http://www.alternet.org/story/22289/

Now, it's pretty obvious that anyone *knowingly* distributing child pornography isn't going to have documentation proving the underage nature of the people in their images, but neither are they likely to advertise themselves openly on the internet to the point where the authorities can easily locate them, let alone publish a valid address where the authorities can just turn up and find the site owners.

With clearly underage images, the law is pointless.

With age-borderline images, it means a failure of record keeping to show innocence is a new offence, but presumably law enforcement officials would still have to track down the actors as they would have done previously, (with or without the help of the website owners), to find out if the people really were underage or not.

At best, it makes it easier to find out that there was no child-pornography offence being committed by legitimate borderline site owners, but presumably most of *them* would have kept some records anyway for their own protection.

Effectively the greatest extra cost is placed on sites with clearly fully adult material, yet who have to keep much effectively useless data available for fear of prosecution.

If the US government decides it wants to regulate the pornography industry, that's one thing. Using child pornography as a smokescreen seems dishonest at best.

I find it kinda sad that people are so concerned and suspicious that they're leery of someone taking pics of kids at a pool. Hadn't ever *thought* about it before, as I have no kids to protect, but I'm glad I'm not someone who thinks all kids are an exceptionally beautiful and special part of the universe, or I'd probably have gotten into loads of trouble for taking hundreds of candid pics of them, just like I do with sunsets and flowers and trees and other living things.

Photography just isn't a good hobby anymore. If you take photos of kids, you must be a paedophile. If you take photos of buildings, you must a terrorist. Perhaps the government should just require a liscence for owning a camera like they do for concealed weapons, since they are clearly so dangerous.

well its the sad people out there in the world that has wasted it for everyone else , what can be done , are they to much sex in movies , newspapers,people dressing in next to nothing ,there is a lot out there that feeds the person with the problem .tig

"A pair of risque Art Deco statues at the US Justice Department have been quietly put back on show, three years after a mysterious cover-up."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4623239.stm

"The two sculptures, in the building's famous Great Hall, were covered during the tenure of former Attorney General John Ashcroft, a devout Christian."

"Covering the statues with curtains cost the US government $8,000 (£4,400) in 2002."


Risque?


az

Risque? Only in Janet Jackson Land

I think there's a misprint in your quote, az:

"The two sculptures, in the building's famous Great Hall, were covered during the tenure of former Attorney General John Ashcroft, a blithering idiot."

>>I find it kinda sad that people are so concerned and suspicious that they're leery of someone taking pics of kids at a pool.<< (MoG)

I totally agree with you. However, on that occasion (and I'm not usually so sensitive) it was pointed out to me by another mum. The people at the pool were a mixture of German and British, and it was noticeably the British who were suspicious. (I think there is as much child abduction/paedophilia here - but I can't back that up with figures, it's just my best guess)

Possibly there had been a recent case or something in UK. What I do know is that over there they are horrified at me when they hear that I allow the Gruesomes out alone.

As for the guy at the pool - he had just shown up, and started filming. If he'd been a guest at the apartment complex or something, it wouldn't have been so suspicious.

As for the risqué statues - devout Christian? Has the guy seen a lot of the religious paintings around????

What's Unchristian about being a mammal and thus having a way of (lovingly and intimately) feeding your young?

Or, of course, the fear of child pornography can be used to make *any* kind of pornography easier to control (or too bureacratic or maybe even too risky for people to be involved with):>.

well ban the lot of it of tv , books ,

>>"As for the risqué statues - devout Christian? Has the guy seen a lot of the religious paintings around????"

Depends how repressively Puritan his particular brand of Christianity is. Maybe he'd consider the (generally Catholic-related) religious paintings as heretical or unchristian?

However, it does seem strange that the more *some* people get into certain kinds of Christianityr, and (presumably) the more they try and work their way towards innocence and freedom from sin, the *more* obsessed they get with defining Good and Evil, and the more wound up they get by nudity.
I'd have *thought* the ideal as-God-intended state should be a pre-Fall one of freedom and nakedness, but maybe I'm being too literal?

too literal, or too sensible...

Too right!
Next they'll ban any painting with cherubs in, unless, of course, they're biblically correct cherubim...

As a child, I was kept on a very short lead by my mum. She was a single parent and was terribly worried that something might happen to either myself or my sister.

Don't get me wrong, we were allowed out to play. I there was a big gang of us (remembering that this was between the ages of 6 to 11), we were allowed to go into the Valley and play. There had to be more than 6 of us and if one of us wondered off, the others were soooo eager to go running to their mother to tell them.

I was quite sheltered too. I remember being asked what a virgin was. I had no idea, so asked mum. She answered that it was someon who hadn't had a baby...which in fact was true...in a way.

Potty:
"If someone was accused of performing a lewd act with a cake, denied liking cake, and their house was filled with innocent photographs of cake, it might make consider them likelier to be guilty, but I don't think it would make me consider the alleged offence as more serious, or even assume that the pictures were somehow the *cause* of anything.

If newspapers and magazines contained plenty of pictures of cakes, I'm not sure how getting paranoid about regular people taking pictures that happened to contain cakes would stem the availability of pictures to the occasional obsessive.

Excellently put and lets not forget that people were making, eating and perhaps commiting lewd acts with cakes even before the invention of photography.

Continuing the analogy, if someone was going around taking lots of pictures of cakes, or videoing cakes through a baker's shop-window without obvious cause, their actions would make me wonder about the *person*, acting as a demonstration of their current mental state (especially if there was general suspicion of cake-photography in society), but it wouldn't necessarily make me think their actions would have any particular effect *on* their mental state unless I had reasonable evidence to show that was the case.

It would me someone who willingly subverts the overriding attitude and shows no sort of regard for any offence they are ausing is obviously a dodgy character who needs to be reminded (within legal frameworks) that their conduct is unacceptable. That is if what they are donig is breaking the law, but even if its not the lack of courtesy to others would be a cause of concern too.

Aha! I have it now! Telecommuting, wireless networking...Bill Gates is in bed with the federal governments! He wants to make sure no one ever goes outside, because that way, they can't BE terrorists or pedophiles or even thinking beings...because they're attached to the ubernetwork!